Putting the state in its place: the domestic education debate in New Zealand.

A number of states introduced domestic science for girls by regulation into national school systems in the early twentieth century. In Britain, North America and Australasia a debate has developed over the extent to which these regulations were a blueprint for the state’s imposition of domesticity on women. However, the debate concentrates on the domestic education blueprints. It assumes that the regulations were simply implemented. This was not an assumption that a group of New Zealand schoolgirl editors of the Wellington Girls’ High School magazine made in 1918 :